"Excuse me, even if I were certain that nothing could possibly be known about the circumstances in which this passport was issued, I should still refuse the application. Everybody suffers in this war; I suffer myself in a minor degree by having to abandon my own work and masquerade in this country as what you well call a U.V.W.X.Y.Z."
"But even if we grant that in some cases suffering is inevitable," Sylvia urged, eagerly, "here's a case where it is not. Here's a case where, by applying a touch of humanity, you can save a soul. But I won't put it that way, because I know you have no use for souls. Here's a case where you can save a body for civilization, for that fetish on whose account you find yourself in Bucharest and half Europe is slaughtering the other half. You are not appealing to any divine law when you refuse to grant this passport: you are appealing to a human law. Very well, then. You are in your own way at this moment fighting for England; yet when somebody longs to be English you refuse her. If there is any reality behind your patriotism, if it is not merely the basest truckling to a name, a low and cowardly imitation of your next-door neighbor whose opinion of yourself you fear as much as he fears your opinion of him, if your patriotism is not just this, you'll be glad to give this child the freedom of your country. Philip, you and I made a mess of things. I was to blame for half the mess; but when you married me, though you married me primarily to please yourself, there was another motive behind—the desire to give a lonely little girl a chance to deal with the life that was surging round her more and more dangerously every day. Now you have another opportunity of doing the same thing, and this time without any personal gratification. It isn't as if I were asking you to do something that could possibly hurt England. I tell you I will be responsible for her. If the worst came to the worst and anything were found out, I could always take the blame and you could never be even censured for accepting my word in such a case."
Sylvia could see by Philip's face that her arguments were doing nothing to convince him, yet she went on, desperately:
"And if you refuse this, you don't merely condemn her, you condemn me, too. Nothing will induce me to abandon her to that man. By your bowing down to the letter of the regulation you expose me for the second time to the life that you drove me to before."
Philip made a gesture of protest.
"Very well, then I won't accuse you of being responsible on the first occasion, certainly not wantonly. But this time, if I'm driven to the same life, it will be your fault and your fault alone. I'm not going to bother about my body if I think that by destroying it I can save a soul. I shall stick at nothing to preserve Queenie—at nothing, do you hear? You have the chance to send us both safely back to England. Philip, you won't refuse!"
"I'm sorry. It's terribly painful for me to say 'no.' But it's impossible. Only quite recently the Foreign Office sent round a warning that we were to be specially careful in this part of the world. No papers of naturalization are issued in time of war. Why, I'm sent here to Bucharest for the express purpose of preventing people like your friend obtaining fraudulent passports."
"The Foreign Office!" Sylvia scoffed. "How can you expect people not to be Christians? It was just to redeem mankind from the sin that creates Foreign Offices and War Offices and bureaucrats and shoddy kings and lawyers and politicians that Christ died. Oh, you can sneer! but your belief is condemned out of your own mouth. You puny little U.V.W.X.Y.Z. with your nose buried in your own waste-paper basket, with a red tapeworm gnawing at your vitals, with some damned fool of a narrow-headed general for an idol, you have the impertinence to sneer at Christianity. Do you think that after this war people are going to be content with the kind of criminal state that you represent? Life is not a series of rules, but a set of exceptions. Philip, forgive me if I have been rude, and let this girl have a passport, please, please!"
"You must not think," Philip answered, "that because I plead the necessities of war in defense of what strikes you as mere bureaucratic obscurantism that therefore I am defending war itself; I loathe war from the bottom of my heart. But just as painful operations are often necessary in accidents which might easily have been avoided, yet which having happened must be cured in the swiftest way, so in war-time for the good of the majority the wrongs of the nation must take precedence over the wrongs of the individual. I sympathize profoundly with the indignation that you feel on account of this girl, but the authorities in England, after due consideration of the danger likely to accrue to the state from the abuse of British nationality by aliens, have decided to enforce with the greatest strictness the rules about the granting of passports."
"Oh, don't explain the reasons to me as if I were a baby," Sylvia burst in. "The proposition of the Foreign Office is self-evident in its general application. My point is with you personally. You are not a professional bureaucrat who depends for his living on his capacity for dehumanizing himself. In this case you have a special reason to exercise your rights and your duties as an amateur. You are as positive as you can ever hope to be positive about anything, even your absurd positivist creed, that while no harm can result to your country, a great mercy will be conferred upon an individual as the result of enlightened action."